Paragons: Year of the Ebony Crown

[JayRay]

Actually YES, the world is very much geologically active. The map is not misleading showing scars of a world that has undergone great geologic change.

In Kharis - Yeshar canon, there have been five known recorded cataclysms. known as "Reckonings", some have been global continental shifts, breakups, volcanic near-extinction level events, and the latest one practically destroyed the eastern most continent of Yeshar, now known as the Broken Lands causing the mass migration to Kharis some twelve hundred years earlier.

The First Reckoning (???) occured near the southearnern most region of Yeshar, and was when a meteor blasted into the landscape. While it was not a complete extinction level event, it completely rocked and fractured the world, creating new fault lines, and spreading the first civilization to the four corners of that continent for survival. The ash cloud also dramaticallly changed climate conditions.

The Second Reckoning (2300 AR) was triggered by an alteration in the path of one of the two natural satellites of the world, the moon 'Raath', bringing it closer to the world, causing massive earthquakes, tidal motions, and very nearly destroying all life. Legends say a group of dragons chained themselves to the moon and dragged it back to where it was, but whether this legend was based on fact or not is conjecture as of now.

The Third Reckoning (2310 AR) was the eruption of a super volcano in Kharis, possibly agitated by the repeated jarring of tectonic plates, and tidal movements, near southern Merede, creating the ashen 'Banelands' of southern Merede and southwestern Sharistae. To this day, vegatation is sparse in the region, and the blackened sands are often stated to be 'cursed' and have creatures that rise from it daily, caked in the dark ash.

The Fourth Reckoning, (2350 AR) due the third was actually an after-effect, practically a 'snowball earth effect', where about 1/3 of the current oceans were locked away in massive icy caps at the north and south poles. The world was dormant for quite some time afterwards.

and finally the Fifth Reckoning (5455 AR), which, depending on who you hear from it, has a thousand origins, resulted in a chain of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, causing the shifting, breaking up, and geological destruction of one of the huge continental plates of Yeshar, and at the same time liquifying the icy stores of water, flooding the world's coastal cities in tidal force. Tsunamis ripped through civilizations, vast libraries of knowledge were lost forever, and moreso, out of the hundreds of millions of people that called Yeshar home, only three hundred thousand survived to escape to Kharis from those lands. Those that lived in Kharis already had spread widely enough in their exploration of Kharis that while losing port cities was a huge blow, they were still able to function. This event, is thought to have happened about 1200 years previous, which would have made the year 6655 AR , had not the Sharistan Emporer instilled a new era calendar, beginning on the day the first nomadic refugees landed at Saraava. It is currently 1196 ND, The Year of Seven Storms.